Published: 2025-06-30

The ending of the letter in the correspondence of the 17th and 18th centuries as an etiquette macroact

Katarzyna Sicińska Logo ORCID

Abstract

The subject of the article is the ending of letters in correspondence from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The description uses a pragmalinguistic approach or, more precisely, a description from the perspective of speech acts and linguistic etiquette. The aim of the research is to present the ending of a letter as a kind of an etiquette macroact, which consists of individual microacts that carry out different communicative intentions. The source database consists of about 500 letters, written by 73 people of the noble estate. In the course of the analysis, it was shown that the end of a letter may consist of two types of microacts: (1) phatic acts with the function of farewell (announcements of the cessation of contact and symbolic farewells), (2) concomitant acts: expressive (positive evaluation of the correspondence partner, expression of feelings towards the addressee), declarative (placing oneself under the care of the addressee, offering services to the addressee, self-identification of the sender) and performative (requests). The multiplicity of intentions expressed in the conclusion of the letter results from the strategic nature of this fragment of the epistolary text. The intensification of interactivity and politeness serves to mitigate the negative impression caused by the end of contact on the part of the sender, and, at the same time, to design further positive interactions with the addressee.

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Sicińska, K. (2025). The ending of the letter in the correspondence of the 17th and 18th centuries as an etiquette macroact. Forum Lingwistyczne, 13(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.31261/FL.2025.13.1.08

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Vol. 13 No. 1 (2025)
Published: 2025-06-30


ISSN: 2449-9587
eISSN: 2450-2758
Ikona DOI 10.31261/FL

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Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego | University of Silesia Press

Licence CC Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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